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This Sustainable Life — Science & Medicine
This Sustainable Life

Do you care about the environment but feel “I want to act, but if no one else does, it won’t make a difference,” and “But if you don’t solve everything, it isn’t worth doing anything”?

We are the antidote! You’re not alone. Hearing role models overcome the same feelings to enjoy acting on their values creates meaning, purpose, community, and emotional reward.

Want to improve as a leader? Bestselling author, 3-time TEDx speaker, leadership speaker, coach, and professor Joshua Spodek, PhD, MBA, brings joy and inspiration to acting on the environment. You’ll learn to lead without relying on authority.

We bring you leaders from many areas — business, politics, sports, arts, education, and more — to share their expertise for you to learn from. We then ask them to share and act on their environmental values. That’s leadership without authority — so they act for their reasons, not out of guilt, blame, doom, gloom, or someone telling them what to do.

Guests include:

Dan Pink, 40+ million TED Talk views

Marshall Goldsmith, #1-ranked leadership guru and author

Frances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, former CEO of the Girl Scouts

Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager

Vincent Stanley, Director of Patagonia

Dorie Clark, bestselling author

Bryan Braman, Super Bowl champion, Philadelphia Eagle

John Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcaster

Alisa Cohn, top 100 speaker and coach

David Biello, Science curator for TED

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Latest Episodes:

Cassiano Laureano, part 2: Burpees for the body, banzai tree for the heart and mind Nov 17, 2021

Show notes

Cassiano's first episode led to more listener comments than most. People loved his enthusiasm. I find guys who know martial arts tend to speak with a security. The opposite of insecure or desperate. So I think people found him accessible and engaging.

I think you'll find him more so this episode. Of course, we talk a bit about his world record for burpees. As you can tell from this episode's title, he fulfilled his commitment by buying a banzai tree. He loved it! He shares his experience buying it, caring for it, and designing it, or grooming it. I'm not sure the right word.

Sadly, I lost the video of the tree, but you can hear him describing it. You may remember from his first episode that he saw a missing connection to nature for humans in cities. I think you'll agree that the tree's value and effect on Cassiano transcends just something he takes care of. We talk about values and how to enjoy life.

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529: Katie Redford, part 2: No distractions. Keeping oil in the ground. Nov 16, 2021

Show notes

I see exactly two highest priorities for material goals to restore Earth's ability to sustain life. One is keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Down there it's safe. Above ground, it's poison and deadly. However clear and straightforward, almost no one focuses on this simple, effective, attainable goal.

Katie does. Our first conversation was just starting when we had to stop. We mostly talked that time about her past, groundbreaking work. In this episode we talk about her present work with pipelines in the U.S., their disproportionate effects on communities based on class, race, and more, and her work on them.

You can hear her passion in every sentence. I felt connected with someone so devoted and passionate, not waiting for others to act. This episode will rouse even the complacent among you.

(The second priority is outside the scope of Katie and my conversation: returning global population to a level Earth can sustain through voluntary, noncoercive means such as practiced at national levels by several nations all others could emulate.)

The Equation Campaign

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528: Don't Bother With Stewardship. It Makes Your Life Worse. Especially If You're American. Nov 10, 2021

Show notes

I've meant to record this episode for a while, as the idea of saying "fuck it," not trying, forgetting about the future and my effect on others, and enjoying what our society offers seems everyone else's choice.

So I'm going full snarky. A rare unedited episode, starting from these minimal notes:

Reasons not to care

Money
Clothes
Travel
Understanding
Disgust, can look away
Disposability
Kids: was going to say I couldn't look them in the eye
Sales and marketing
Get credit anyway
Showers
Cars
Eat anything
Community
Society is for you

Reasons to care

Help other people you don't know and aren't born
Animals

Why I can't not care

I lack the privilege of scientific ignorance

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527: Mike Michalowicz, part 1: Entrepreneurship, stewardship, and engaging, compelling writing Nov 07, 2021

Show notes

Mike and I are in an online writing group together. For a while I knew him as the funny and diligent guy whose books have thousands of reviews online. Then I read his big one, Profit First. I know entrepreneurship from living it, so I expected to skim it, but two things. His writing is as funny and engaging as he is and what he wrote was new and valuable. Those who have read it know what I mean when I share that I set up my five accounts right after finishing it.

Next I read Fix This Next and loved it too. I couldn't skim it because it also contained richness that I couldn't just gloss over. Plus it's fun, funny, and vulnerable. Both books covered values and acting on them. I invited him to the podcast and he loved the idea.

I don't know if he realizes how relevant his approach to entrepreneurship is to sustainability. Like previous guest Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art, I could copy Mike's books switching entrepreneurial things like profligate polluting for sustainability things lik profligate spending and humanity suffering for just family suffering. Other areas with parallels:

Chasing growth mindlessly
Ignoring costs
Shame keeping you from change (also hopelessness, futility, community)
Imbalance, not knowing or prioritizing values
Unthinkingly applying old way that seems like it should work but it worsens
Delaying what you really want, never getting it (profit / clean air)
Desperation
Monster destroys family and community
Denial

Since I see him often online, I've heard little clues that his commitment from this episode is creating meaning for him. Listen to hear it. I wonder if it will lead him to apply his approach to sustainability.

Mike's home page

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526: A recent talk on doof, heroin, crack, and sustainability Nov 07, 2021

Show notes

This talk gets to the root of what I see destroying Earth's ability to sustain life and our health and happiness in the process.

Here is the audio a recent talk I gave on doof, building up to what we can do to get rid of it, and improving our world in the process. I compare its effects with those of heroin, crack, and other addictions. I examine what makes something doof, like if it's advertised, packaged, fiber-removed, or the big one: if the manufacturer engineered it to create craving.

I consider this audio a great talk.

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525: Katie Redford, part 1: She beat a multinational oil company in court just getting started Nov 04, 2021

Show notes

Katie is the sort of role model I do this podcast to bring to the world. Her challenges are huge, but her passion and determination greater.

I can find a million people who say they care about the environment. They probably do. I can find some who act on this caring. I can find a few who do things that sound great like starting companies to do well by doing good. Of them, many are helping restore Earth's ability to sustain life.

Then there's Katie. She's devoting everything she's got beyond just cleaning some area. She's going to what I consider as near the root of our problems, and the most effective solution: keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Most "solutions" like renewables, recycling, offsets, and what makes the news, in my view mostly just shuffle pollution around after we already brought fossil fuels out from underground where they were benign.

When we recorded, she was in the middle of helping stop a pipeline, working with the local community. We talked about her current work and her past groundbreaking work with Doe v. Unocal and cases that followed its precedent.

But I want most to comment on our conversation's tone. I loved talking with her as someone else who saw our problems and dove in to solve them, not dip around the edges, and she's succeeding. I love talking with someone not justifying or making excuses, but enthusiastic.

How we feel depends on what we give relative to our potential. I've learned not to judge myself for things outside my control. I loved talking with her because I felt a bond over devoting ourselves to a great cause and giving all we have.

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524: James Rebanks, part 1: Pastoral Song Nov 02, 2021

Show notes

James Rebanks' first massively bestselling book, The Shepherd's Life, and the images of that life he posts online, at first make you think he hails from another time. It describes a life both almost unimaginable to most city dwellers like myself and more than half the Earth and traditional, going back centuries or even millennia. He illustrates his relationships with his father and grandfather, the land, the sheep, and history.

But he also shows that he is from now, not another time. I sensed myself out of touch with humanity and nature with plastic and not knowing what trees and birds live near me. In his second book, Pastoral Song, also a massive bestsellr, he describes more his conflict and struggle with the invasion of modernity into his life, his foray into acceptance, and ultimate his joyful rejection of it.

Many of us dream of rejecting the parts of modernity that stultify us but decline to act out of fear. James rejected it, not easy. You'll love his openness and experiences likely different from anyone you know. When British people talk about the Lake District, they get wistful. I've never been there. James is of that territory.

James's views contrast and complement previous guest James Suzman's, who wrote about the San bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Both speak of living in harmony and balance with nature, struggling at the first world expanding into their territory.

In our conversation, James Rebanks shares his views and experience on nature, family, and his life. I mostly bring people from organizations---businesses, political office, sports teams, etc. James comes from family, farms, and England's Lake District. He shares a life unlike anyone I met but probably like thousands of my ancestors.

Here is the quote I read:

For weeks afterward, as we passed Henry’s farm, Dad would tell me that we were bloody fools. This news confirmed something Dad had always felt in his gut. Deep down he had never really believed in many of the changes, and with every passing year he was becoming more skeptical. We were doing these new things because we had to—getting more cattle and sheep, acquiring bigger machines, making these changes and meanwhile losing good people—and yet where was it all heading? If modern farming made the soil worse, and reduced it to a junkie requiring more and more hits of shop-bought chemicals, then how sustainable was it? Dad couldn’t step out of it entirely, but he saw right through it. Rather than admire our friends and relatives who were creating huge new farming businesses, with enormous buildings and loads of machinery and staff, he worried for them. He thought their world was ugly, built on debt, and increasingly risky and volatile; it would all come crashing down around them someday. And when it began to, and some of the biggest farms went bankrupt, he defended them and said we had all been fools once. There was no pleasure in seeing farmers losing their farms.

My father knew the truth lay in Henry’s soil.

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523: Dr. Warren Farrell, part 1: Actually listening to men, what they keep to themselves Oct 29, 2021

Show notes

If I measure a book's quality by how much it changes my perspective and enables me to improve my life, Dr. Farrell's The Myth of Male Power (1993) is one of the best books I've read. He's written valuable book after valuable books since, up to and including The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (2018).

I grew up believing in equality between the sexes and believe so now more than ever. Dr. Farrell's insight helped illuminate and clarify ways I and society don't empathize with men or realize how men are trapped and suffer. I've written about the chip on my shoulder about how people respond to my sharing my suffering to say my suffering isn't suffering and that I'm actually causing others to suffer or that the best I can do is to shut up and listen. I knew something was missing. His work helped make things fall into place.

If I measure someone's leadership by how much that person influences others through inspiration, not coercion or authoritarian means, Dr. Farrell is a great leader. My mentor, Frances Hesselbein, also says the role of a leader is to see what others don't, which he does too.

Bringing things back our environment, his leadership in seeing and clearly describing what others don't resembles what I find mission in sustainability. I'll always welcome more science and reporting, but we lack leadership. We lack people who inspire by connecting with their intrinsic motivations. I believe we can learn from him and apply what he's achieved in sustainability.

Warren Farrell's home page

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522: Abdal Hakim Murad, part 1: Britain’s most influential Muslim thinker Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

A reader followed up on my conversations with religious figures and authorities from branches of Christianity and Judaism. He wrote

You have presented religious people with «the book». That’s good, and I hope you will find space for a muslim person/scholar and relate it to your concern about the sustainability and climate. I can recommend one person. He is, I believe the leader of Cambridge Muslim College, UK. Abdal Hakim Murad (actually British who converted to islam). He is highly and well respected and also provide guidance on the contemporary society to the community of muslims in UK and also in Europe.

While I know about Islam, I don't know many Muslims, so loved the suggestion and connected with Abdal Hakim.

Beyond his leadership role in Cambridge, England, his personal story and accomplishments intrigued me. The conversation was for me enlightening, especially his insider view of communities that, to the extent I've learned of them, I got a one-sided, American view. He shared of erudite sophistication. We spoke about cultures intersecting and intermingling.

He also share of Islam's long history in Europe, patiently given my knowing little, so if you'd like to learn more and don't know much, I think you'll appreciate our conversation.

Religion and the environment

Our conversation also reinforced my impression that religious people connect with sustainability and stewardship with emotions mine are closer to: beauty and joy, for example, more than obligation and chore, which I hear from environmentalists. He recounts examples of Islam and sustainability, practiced naturally, not just following a recent trend.

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521: Blake Haxton, part 2: Teamwork is crucial. How to solve that we're divided Oct 21, 2021

Show notes

I loved Blake and my conversation so much, I'm releasing our first two conversations back to back. Also, our first one didn't reach to The Spodek Method, so he hadn't taken on a commitment based on his environmental values, so we recorded a week later instead of having to wait for him to finish the commitment. He takes on a commitment in this episode, so he'll come back a third time at least.

We talked about how life brings us challenges. In his case a disease led to losing both legs. For everyone, generations of a polluting culture led to the risk of human population collapse. We won't be able to live as before, and possibly billions won't be able to live at all.

Blake is coming to grips with the extent of the situation and what anyone can do about it. We talk about value, teamwork, training, and how his experience and lessons could help everyone. By the end, you'll hear how he starts considering potential roles he could take on sustainability. As you can hear in the last episode and this one, I see his experiences, beliefs, and lessons could help everyone, especially Americans, who treat changing our behavior and the culture driving it as deprivation, respond with enthusiasm instead of the usual "what I do doesn't matter" or "only governments and corporations can act on the scale we need."

He's thoughtful and shares thoughts he's had before our conversation. You can hear him developing and reconsidering his perspectives during the conversation.

I envision Blake taking a leadership role in sustainability leadership. No one has to act on it. Nearly everyone has chosen not to, to hope someone else will take care of things. Only people who want to make sustainability leadership their calling are doing so---nearly no one. But I see him seeing his potential for reaching people in ways no one else can.

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